HD Audio mod for Shenmue 1 using uncompressed voices from Shenmue the movie from Xbox?

Joined
Jul 27, 2018
So a guy on /r/shenmue suggested this as a mod, I am only linking back to his post and trying tot get a discussion started around the possibility of doing a mod like this. Sure some voices are being played while sound effects and music are, but surely a good audio editing app can separate the audio channels up?


Here is a link to the original discussion. But surely this could be done, just a daunting task.


Obviously the lesser important NPC characters aren't included with this, but at least the main ones could be added.
 
It's a lot harder to remove background music / sound effects than you would think. I don't think this would be possible without noticeable audio artifacts from that. Even if you did manage to get rid of them, it would probably sound very filtered, defeating the purpose of an HD audio mod. And even if it did work, it'd be a fraction of the dialogue in the game and would probably just stick out.
 
If anyone is interested, I have cleaned up a sample of Ryo's lines w/o music from the uncompressed assets featured in the, 'Shenmue The Movie' 2001 short film/edit of the first game.

If attachment doesn't work, try uncompressed .flac, here or uncompressed .wav here

Time to find some sailors!
 

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If anyone is interested, I have cleaned up a sample of Ryo's lines w/o music from the uncompressed assets featured in the, 'Shenmue The Movie' 2001 short film/edit of the first game.

If attachment doesn't work, try uncompressed .flac, here or uncompressed .wav here

Time to find some sailors!
So, this is actually pretty solid; and I'm actually interested in seeing what you can do with some of the OG files, as opposed to Shenmue: The Movie.

So, this is some ground I feel we have to re-tread every so often. So, cleaning up the dialogue from Shenmue: The Movie sounds good only on paper. When you follow the idea through to its logical conclusion, it's really mediocre at best. So, first off, I want to say great job at cleaning up these lines of dialogue, you did a great job mitigating one of the largest problems with "upscaling" and cleaning up dialogue. Voiceless alveolar fricatives are the bane of any audio engineer's existence. Shenmue, having heavily compressed dialogue audio has a huge problem with them. Now; Shenmue has several hundred THOUSANDS of lines of dialogue, and Shenmue: The Movie has only a small sliver of that. If we are to clean up only the Shenmue: The Movie dialogue, and insert that, it would only make that disparity in quality more apparent. On top of this, most of that dialogue that would be improved would be that inside cutscenes; which would make cutscenes feel just that much more separate from gameplay. This would be a very "un-Shenmue" thing, and would not fit the design of Shenmue.

All this being said, as I said, I'd be very interested in seeing what you're capable of in terms of cleaning up the original dialogue. If you would like, I'd be willing to put together some lines from various characters/scenes for you to make some tests from.
 
So, this is actually pretty solid; and I'm actually interested in seeing what you can do with some of the OG files, as opposed to Shenmue: The Movie.

All this being said, as I said, I'd be very interested in seeing what you're capable of in terms of cleaning up the original dialogue. If you would like, I'd be willing to put together some lines from various characters/scenes for you to make some tests from.
I understand. I suppose it would be a little jarring if the only focus was on the movie edit of the game instead of the in game lines that are heavily compressed.

I would be glad to take a look if you are willing to take time out and do that.
 
A little update.

Was able to get some more lines cleaned up a bit from the original Shenmue.

NOTE...These aren't in any kind of order or anything. Just some random lines I found and attempted clean up. Some sound better then others but on the whole, have come out rather nicely.

0180A001 - Ryo - Yan Tin Apartments
0180A002 - Ryo - Guizhang here?
0180C003 - NPC - You Young Fella!
0180E015 - NPC - Get Lost!
0180E018 - NPC - Just Get Lost!
H2004A006 - Ryo - Didn't Know?
H2004A011 - Ryo - HEY!
H2004A012 - Ryo - Don't Have Time
H2004A015 - Ryo - Maybe

and of course, those Men in the Black Suits? (These one sounds really good)
 
A little update.

Was able to get some more lines cleaned up a bit from the original Shenmue.

NOTE...These aren't in any kind of order or anything. Just some random lines I found and attempted clean up. Some sound better then others but on the whole, have come out rather nicely.

0180A001 - Ryo - Yan Tin Apartments
0180A002 - Ryo - Guizhang here?
0180C003 - NPC - You Young Fella!
0180E015 - NPC - Get Lost!
0180E018 - NPC - Just Get Lost!
H2004A006 - Ryo - Didn't Know?
H2004A011 - Ryo - HEY!
H2004A012 - Ryo - Don't Have Time
H2004A015 - Ryo - Maybe

and of course, those Men in the Black Suits? (These one sounds really good)
I'm actually really enjoying this. Do you happen to use Discord? It would be best to message me on there, I completely forgot this thread existed until I had a random thought about it. I think this could go a VERY long way, actually. I'm particularly impressed by "I wonder if Guizhang is here", although I think it might need to use a little tweaking for glottal sounds now lmao.

https://discord.gg/saeDxf2p Here's a link to our Discord server, you can message me on there, I'm AliaAtreides#3641 Once you get a hold of me on there, I'll start setting up a testing environment, so we can test these in-game, and see if this is worthwhile.
 
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